Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (138 page)

With the Kristallnacht pogrom the preceding November, Hitler had broken with all norms of civilisation. Now, by marching on Prague, he had crossed a comparable line in foreign policy. Ulrich von Hassell was right when he diagnosed this as “a first case of open hubris, a violation of all boundaries and also of all standards of decency.”
³³⁸
There was no going back. On 15 March, Hitler believed he was at the zenith of his unprecedented career, but in reality his descent had already begun. He had gone down a path that would lead to his own demise. “That day,” as François-Poncet aptly put it, “his fate was sealed.”
³³⁹

—

Of course, contemporary observers had to have a particularly keen eye to see the seeds of future catastrophe within Hitler’s triumphs.
³⁴⁰
On 20 April 1939, as Germany’s dictator celebrated his fiftieth birthday, the shadows of nemesis were far off in the future. Goebbels once again did his utmost to encourage cultish worship of the Führer. “The creator of Greater Germany is fifty years old,” wrote Victor Klemperer. “Two days of lavish special editions of the newspapers. People falling over themselves to deify him.”
³⁴¹
Goebbels had begun preparing this event the previous summer. Then, in early December, Hitler had mentioned in passing that he did not wish for any particular festivities on his birthday, which Goebbels interpreted as an order to halt the preparations.
³⁴²
But the propaganda minister must have realised that Hitler had not wanted to be taken at his word. In terms of sheer volume, the programme that he came up with in January and which Hitler approved went beyond any previous festivities marking the Führer’s birthday. Several days before the big event Goebbels noted drily: “A lot of work with the Führer’s birthday. This time it is truly going to be celebrated.”
³⁴³

The press was issued detailed instructions about how the man at the top was to be honoured. Journalists were told not to write about “his childhood, his family or his private life” as “unbelievable amounts of nonsense have been published on these three subjects in the past.” By contrast, they were encouraged to spill lots of ink about Germany’s political turnaround and the political career of Adolf Hitler, and newspapers were instructed to publish large-scale, beautifully designed special editions.
³⁴⁴
The unusual significance of Hitler’s fiftieth birthday as the ceremonial high point of the year was underscored when, at short notice, Wilhelm Frick declared 20 April 1939 a national holiday. That allowed large numbers of Germans from every corner of the Reich to take part in the festivities.

A radio address by Goebbels broadcast on all stations in Germany at 6:30 p.m. on 19 April kicked off the official programme. In his customary Byzantine style, the propaganda minister lauded Hitler as a “man of historic stature,” whom the German people willingly and obediently followed in everything he undertook. “Like a miracle,” Goebbels declared, Hitler had found a “basic solution to a central European question previously regarded as nearly insoluble.” He called Hitler’s forced break-up of Czechoslovakia an act of “peace based on practical reality.”
³⁴⁵
At seven that evening, the entire NSDAP leadership—1,600 people in total—offered their congratulations in the Mosaic Hall of the Chancellery. Hess reassured the Führer of the unconditional loyalty of his vassals, should the “conflict-mongers of the world take things to the extreme,” and presented Hitler with the gift of fifty original letters written by his hero Friedrich the Great.
³⁴⁶
These were only one of the many presents that lay stacked upon tables in the same Chancellery hall where Bismarck had convened the Berlin Congress in 1878. Many of them were kitsch, but some gifts—for instance, works by two of Hitler’s favourite painters, Franz von Defregger and Carl Theodor von Piloty—were quite valuable. The economics minister and Reichsbank president, Walther Funk, outdid everyone else with his present for the art lover Hitler:
Venus in Front of the Mirror
by Titian.
³⁴⁷

The main spectacle on the eve of Hitler’s birthday was the dedication of the East–West Axis, the first major stretch of the new traffic system envisioned for the makeover of the capital. Accompanied by Albert Speer, Hitler drove down the broad, 7-mile road in an open car, where hundreds of thousands of Berliners had responded to Goebbels’s call to turn out and form a guard of honour. “A celebration without compare,” a satisfied Goebbels noted. “The street was bathed in a fairy-tale glow. And an unprecedented atmosphere. The Führer beamed with glee.”
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Shortly after 10 p.m. at the Wehrmacht’s Grand Tattoo, fifty members of the “old guard” from each of the Gaue paraded by torchlight down Wilhelmstrasse. The Führer greeted the columns of Brownshirts from the Chancellery balcony.

At midnight, Hitler accepted the congratulations and gifts of his inner entourage. He seemed especially taken by the 4-metre-high model of the gigantic triumphal arch that Speer had had installed in the hall on Pariser Platz. “Visibly moved, he gazed for a long time at the model that physically manifested the dream of his younger years,” Speer recalled. “Completely overcome, he shook my hand without saying a word, before telling the other guests in a euphoric voice about the significance of this structure for the future history of the Reich.”
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Almost compulsively, Hitler returned to stare at the model numerous times that night, abandoning himself to his fantastical vision of the future “world capital Germania.”

The festivities continued the following morning with a concert by the band of the SS Leibstandarte in the Chancellery garden. The doyen of the diplomatic corps, the Papal nuncio Monsignor Cesare Orsenigo, led the ranks of those congratulating Hitler on his birthday. He was followed by the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Konstantin von Neurath, with Emil Hácha in his wake, Jozef Tiso, members of the Reich government and the heads of the Wehrmacht. Symbolically for Hitler’s immediate plans was the fact that he received the Gauleiter of Danzig, Albert Forster, who brought along a document naming Hitler an honorary citizen of the city intended as a “sign of its profound blood relation” to the German people.
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At 11 a.m., the Wehrmacht commenced its parade up and down the East–West Axis. It lasted four hours and aimed at illustrating the military strength the Reich had built up. All Wehrmacht formations took part, and the most modern weaponry, particularly tanks and heavy artillery, was put on display. A grandstand had been erected in front of Berlin’s Technical University, where Hitler inspected the parade from under a canopy with a throne and the Führer’s banner. “I always wonder where he gets his strength,” Christa Schroeder wrote in a letter to a friend. “To stand there and greet people for four hours is damn taxing. We all felt dead tired just watching him.”
³⁵¹

At Hitler’s behest, Ribbentrop had invited 150 prominent foreign guests whom he sought to impress with such a display of military force. Absent from the grandstand, however, were the ambassadors of Britain and France, who had been recalled after Hitler’s violation of the Munich Agreement. The United States had withdrawn its ambassador in November 1938 after the Kristallnacht pogrom. After the parade, Hitler invited his foreign guests to take tea with him, the Reich ministers, the Reich directors of the Nazi Party and the military leadership at the Chancellery.
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The German newsreels covering the week from 16 to 23 April were devoted exclusively to Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. Twelve cameramen had shot more than 10,000 metres of film, which had been edited down to the standard newsreel length of 546 metres. The military parade, praised by the narrator as “the greatest military display of the Third Reich,” was the centrepiece of the reports. No doubt this emphasis was intended to get the populace psychologically used to war, as Hitler had called for in his speech to the officer corps on 10 November 1938. Hitler no longer presented himself in the guise of the infallible statesman, but in the martial pose of a field commander who was displaying the fearsome might of his military machine to the eyes of an astonished world.
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Goebbels was extremely satisfied with how the two-day festivities had gone. “The Führer was celebrated by the people,” he wrote, “as no mortal man before him has ever been celebrated.”
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SPD-in-exile observers had a more nuanced view of the event. If you looked at the amount of effort that went into the birthday, they wrote, you might easily think that Hitler’s popularity was on the rise. “But anyone who really knows the people,” opined one observer, “knows that a lot, if not all of this, is just show.” Even the readers of the Nazified press were under no illusions about the fact that “Hitler’s foreign-policy star is on the wane and the system is heading towards a second world war that seems lost right from the start.” The observers concluded that “the paralysing fear of war hung over all the bannered splendour and celebratory din.” But they hastened to add that this did not mean that the German people’s faith in the Führer was “extinguished.” On the contrary, it was “alive and well in broad swathes of the populace.”
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Ultimately Hitler’s popularity was due to his aura as someone who always managed to maintain peace despite all his risky manoeuvres. When he unleashed world war at the start of September 1939 and when it became apparent in the winter of 1941–42 that, despite Germany’s lightning-quick early triumphs, the conflict was turning into a military catastrophe, the myth surrounding the Führer would begin to decay, at first slowly but then faster and faster.

Notes

Introduction

1 
In Thomas Mann
, An die gesittete Welt: Politische Schriften und Reden im Exil
, Frankfurt am Main, 1986, p. 253f.

2 
Norbert Frei,
1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewusstsein der Deutschen
, Munich, 2005, p. 7.

3 
Jens Jessen, “Gute Zeiten für Hitler,”
Die Zeit
, 11 Oct. 2012;
idem
, “Was macht Hitler so unwiderstehlich?,”
Die Zeit
, 23 Sept. 2004.

4 
Konrad Heiden,
Adolf Hitler: Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit. Eine Biographie
, Zurich, 1936;
idem
,
Adolf Hitler: Ein Mann gegen Europa. Eine Biographie
, Zurich, 1937; Alan Bullock,
Hitler: A Study in Tyranny
, London, 1990 (first published 1952); Joachim Fest,
Hitler
, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Vienna, 1973; Ian Kershaw,
Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris
, London, 1998;
idem
,
Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis
, London, 2000. In addition, Sebastian Haffner’s essay
Anmerkungen zu Hitler
is consistently thought-provoking.

5 
Heiden,
Adolf Hitler: Ein Mann gegen Europa
, p. 267.

6 
Heiden,
Adolf Hitler: Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit
, p. 6.

7 
See Rainer Zitelmann, “Hitlers Erfolge: Erklärungsversuche in der Hitler-Forschung,”
Neue Politische Literatur
, 27 (1982), pp. 47–69, at p. 47 f.; John Lukacs,
Hitler: Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung
, Munich, 1997, p. 20f.; Ulrich Nill, “ ‘Reden wie Lustmorde’: Hitler-Biographen über Hitler als Redner,” in Josef Kopperschmidt (ed.),
Hitler als Redner
, Munich, 2003, pp. 29–37, at pp. 35–7.

8 
Thea Sternheim,
Tagebücher 1903–1971. Vol. II: 1925–1936
, eds. Thomas Ehrsam und Regula Wyss, Göttingen, 2002, p. 664 (entry for 31 Oct. 1935). In a letter to Konrad Heiden, Thea Sternheim wrote that he was the first to say “decisive words on these matters.” She added: “How marvellous to see such a finely honed rapier gleaming.” Ibid., pp. 665f. (entry for 4 Nov. 1935).

9 
Harry Graf Kessler,
Das Tagebuch. Vol. 9: 1926–1937
, ed. Sabine Gruber and Ulrich Ott, with Christoph Hilse and Nadin Weiss, Stuttgart, 2010, p. 663 (entry for 14 April 1936).

10 
See Ernst Schulte Strathaus, expert on cultural questions in the staff of the Führer’s deputy, to Gerhard Klopfer, 5 Oct. 1936, requesting “that the Gestapo and the Security Service collect information on the writer Konrad Heiden.” BA Berlin-Lichterfelde, NS 26/45.

11 
See Lukacs,
Hitler
, p. 22f.; Gerhard Schreiber,
Hitler: Interpretationen 1923–1983: Ergebnisse, Methoden und Probleme der Forschung
, Darmstadt, 1984, pp. 312–14.

12 
Bullock,
Hitler
, p. 382. Bullock revised his position in later works, in particular his double biography
Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives
, London, 1991.

13 
Hermann Rauschning,
Die Revolution des Nihilismus
, Zurich, 1938, p. 56. Rauschning repeated this assessment when he published his conversations with Hitler (
Gespräche mit Hitler
, Zurich, 1940). Bullock and Fest saw this book as a major source, while Kershaw doubted its authenticity. See Kershaw,
Hitler: Hubris
, p. xiv. The present volume also does not use this source. On the question of the authenticity of
Gespräche mit Hitler
, see Jürgen Hensel and Pia Nordblom (eds.),
Hermann Rauschning: Materialien und Beiträge zu einer politischen Biographie
, Osnabrück, 2003, pp. 151ff.